The world-famous email column

Issue #135 – “Pub Life” – September 8th, 2008

-I’ve always wanted to film a documentary where I go thirty days without drinking alcohol and see how much weight I lose, money I save, and how many girls I’m suddenly unable to speak to. It would be called “Sober Size Me.” I’m not sure it’d be Oscar-worthy, but it would certainly reflect the fact that, these days, the vast majority of twentysomethings’ socializing and courtship takes place in bars. Each weekend we dutifully traipse from the shittiest dives to the trendiest velvet ropes in search of a spot where everybody knows your name – but forgets it by morning.

-I recently went to a bar where the cross street was actually Cross Street. Trying to explain to my friends how to get there was like playing drunken “Who’s on First?”

-I have never been in a bar where the atmosphere actually improved after a band started playing.

-Some of my buddies used to play Erotic Photo Hunt, which is an electronic bar game that shows you two pictures of naked chicks and challenges you to find the differences. Then one day the bar changed it from Erotic Photo Hunt to regular Photo Hunt. Suddenly we were counting how many petals were on the daisy a little girl was holding and it just became weird.

-Do good architects consider it beneath them to design bars? I can’t think of any other structures that are laid out so poorly. Most seem to sport the “hourglass” shape in which the front of the bar connects to the back via a narrow channel barely big enough for a single red blood cell to pass. Plus that’s the way to the bathroom. Where there’s one toilet for two hundred wasted people. And it’s broken.

-A chick once asked me to taste a drink made with cherry-flavored vodka. Emasculating for sure, but I was more intrigued by how they can call something cherry-flavored vodka. How many people have eaten an actual cherry in the past year? Not I. Let’s be realistic: when something is “cherry-flavored,” what they’re really saying is that it tastes like “red.”

-My doctor friend Christina promised that the next time we party, in the morning she’ll give me a “banana bag” – which is an IV in my arm full of fluids and multivitamins that they give alcoholics, and also that doctors administer to themselves to cure hangovers. I don’t know what’s weirder – that I’m really looking forward to getting hungover, or that this is the first thing I’ve ever seen on Grey’s Anatomy that is actually true.

-It really bothers me that the dollar is so weak that Europeans are coming to the States and getting obnoxiously wasted for ridiculously cheap. It’s supposed to be the other way around. Last weekend I was in New York at this place that was full of foreigners and they were literally buying $3,000 bottles of champagne, shaking them up, then spraying the crowd with it. And this was at BRUNCH. Me and my buddies were the only Americans there and, as we got sprayed with another round, my first thought was: “I hate these European douchebags.” My second thought was: “God, I am so jealous.”

-As always, here are some random things I’ve been ruminating about lately…

-One of my boys is staunchly opposed to me emailing anything remotely offensive to his work account, and I respect that. However, he just got rid of his personal cell phone because he got one through work, and now he doesn’t want me texting him anything dirty either. I’m hamstrung. He says, “Karo, just don’t curse.” I say, “I’d rather not be friends.”

-I freely admit that it’s going overboard for every article of clothing I wear to the gym to made by Under Armour. But at least that’s better than dressing completely inappropriately. I’m sorry, but you’re not allowed to lift anywhere near me if you’re wearing jeans. Or Birkenstocks.

-My friend wants me to set her up with one my buddies. I told her that I won’t do it unless she joins Facebook. What does she want me to do? Type an email about her and attach some pictures? What is this, the fucking Middle Ages?

-I recently re-signed my lease and it reminded me that when I moved to this apartment, it was from another apartment fifty feet across the street. I can see my old building from my current bedroom. Let me tell you, moving fifty feet is much harder than moving 500 miles. You can’t hire a truck, you can’t get anyone to help you, and you end up making 200 small trips back and forth across the street. I can say with confidence that the human limit for carrying shirts on hangers is twenty-two at a time.

-Mixed drinks are like masturbation: only you know exactly how you like it.

-In the past ten years or so, my dad has become an incredible chef. On recent visits home I’ve eaten pork chops with marinated strawberries, tuna ravioli, steamed salmon with tomatoes and shallots, and shrimp with pasta in a sauteed butternut squash sauce. The problem is, it’s always such a letdown when I get back to my apartment and I’m eating fucking microwaveable soup. And it’s not even the good kind – it’s the kind where you drink right out of an opening in the top, except all the little pasta stars sink to the bottom and you get them in one big glop. Evidently the package was created by the same people who design dive bars.

-And, finally, back in my Wall Street days I’d sometimes leave myself a voicemail on my office phone while shitcanned at the bar. That way, I’d have a funny message to listen to the next morning when I came in hungover and miserable. A few weeks ago, I was out boozing and was struck by the desire to engage in such shenanigans again, but since my office is now my apartment and my office phone is now my cell phone, it proved difficult to accomplish. The next morning I awoke hungover without any drunken voicemails to brighten my day. There was, however, a string of texts to read through: three from buddies asking for the cross street of the bar, two replies from me telling them that “cross street IS the cross street you assholes,” and one from my friend complaining that I’d just cursed in a text message to his work phone. Fuck me.